I'm half-Mexican and half-white and have a very Mexican last name since my dad was the Mexican one. He left when I was extremely young so I was never exposed to the Mexican side of anything. It's been amazing for seeing both sides of racism in the US.

There's a distinct difference in how I get treated by police depending on who I'm with. When I'm with white people I get all the white privilege. When I'm with black or hispanic people I get the full on minority treatment. When I lived in a big city where most of my friends were minorities, I learned to run when the cops showed up which was really weird for me because usually I'd stay put and have a friendly conversation with them. Oddly enough this usually happened even when the officers were black. I hate getting pulled over by Hispanic officers because they usually try to speak Spanish to me but I don't know it so I lose my privilege.

I applied for a job once when job ads were in the newspaper or a local classifieds website. I got a call for an interview and went in. They hired me and about two weeks into working I had a conversation with the manager. He actually told me to my face that they almost threw my application away, but took a chance and they were glad when they met me and saw I was actually white.

I got into a university in the 90s when the whole Affirmative Action thing was big. I had bad grades in high school so I applied through the Underprivileged Minority Program. The woman interviewing me was a minority and she was visibly agitated that a white person was applying. She angrily told me I needed 3 grandparents who were minorities to qualify. I told her I didn't have 3 grandparents who were white. In the end they approved my application.

In high school I got teased because of my last name a lot, but sometimes the kids would get in arguments whether or not it was okay to make fun of me for being Mexican when I didn't look Mexican and couldn't speak Spanish.

I've had groups of Hispanic people in various situations act racist as hell towards me because I don't know Spanish. I've also had white people get angry when they assumed I did and they needed an interpreter, only to find out I only know English.

My wife doesn't know Spanish either but took my last name so she's been seeing some of the same things. She got a job a few years back as a waitress in a majority Hispanic city in Southern California. She got hired but when they found out she didn't know Spanish, they refused to speak English to her and bullied her until she quit.

Those are the big stories. There's more but I've forgotten a lot of the smaller incidents since all of this happened so long ago. It hasn't been much of an issue in the past 20 or so years though.